Tag Archives: love

Train Hop The Future

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” -Charles Bukowski

train hop

Sometimes, I believe that when you throw a buncha creative stuff in a black hole it fuels some mythological unknown beast somewhere who holds the keys to creative freedom and one day BOOM, your hard work pays off and it makes sense. But until then, you gotta white knuckle it.

My life is profoundly weird and intriguing. And so is yours, and yours, and yours, if you just look around and see with your own eyes. Like today, I bumped into a guy wearing ostrich cowboy boots on the way down from my hike, and a little girl ran screaming, blasting out everyone’s ear drums in the library. I talked with a girl I met over a decade ago (before I stole her boyfriend, who is ex for us both) who has my exact same name and is one of my best friends and most favorite people in the world.

I texted with a guy who I’ve known since I was five, my psuedo (and psycho punk) older brother, (we grew up in the same church and the same small town), who is my new band mate, about music files we did last night, four hours of jamming, him on drums, me on guitar, with our keyboardist last night, some psychedelic, trippy music we were surprised turned out really well. We are going to send it to the gatekeeper of this project…we need to write a whole album, soon!

I listened to samples of songs I’ve been working on with a really cool drummer and bass player for my own band project on speaker while hiking because I forgot my headphones.

I read a chapter about Faust, a German Krautrock band who were supported by a record deal in the ’70s in Germany to make an album, when record labels were just throwing out money for experimental bands. They got basically a year of free living and recording studio and they fucked it off to make love and do drugs. They told the label they were going to be the Beatles. They ended up being…rather obscure.

I read about Harmonia, members of Neu! and Cluster who escaped the Krautrock drug scene to go be serious on their own, working with Brain Eno at one point before they all broke off into their own solo projects.

I worked on an essay I’m writing for a women’s issues reading fundraiser coming up in March, about wearing a dress to impress a boy when I hate dresses, but I’m trying to make it about so much more than that. It’s about Mormanism and marriage and expectation, about trying to be someone you’re not. At least, I hope it will be.

I read poems I had published years ago, trying to figure out which ones to read in March at a reading series in Oakland. I found a book on Nefertiti for a patron who came to the reference desk at the library, and then I wondered about the ancient Egyptians for a moment, and how they tie in to psychedelic Krautrock music. So much mystique. So much material to mine.

Just another lazy Saturday. The world is full of stuff to write about and learn about and as long as I’m learning, I feel alive. As long as I write and do music. As long as I stay focused on DATING MY MUSIC, and not getting caught up in what other people think, feel or do. I read the beginning of Joni Mitchell’s biography “Joni” today, and the writer was talking about how in our society we have to be defined by these limited structures of what is acceptable. Don’t be too different! Make sure you are only eccentric in a certain construct, prefabricated by the people before you!

Let’s stop modeling the lives of the artists before us and become our own indefinable artists. The world is ready for more trail blazers, more people following their hearts, letting fantasy take them away, thinking big and open and wide and outside of all these lines and barriers that pin us in and in and in, let’s get out, like crazy hot air balloons, go wild, what’s the worst that can happen?

We’re not hurting anyone, but we are pumping air into our art so we can go curbing like Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, riding the wheels of our creations around corners, thrilling in the trip of whatever we believe destiny will be for us. In a parallel reality, I have done and am everything I ever dreamed, which is why I don’t think we are limited so much as we think we are. Nope, the world is filtered through our own perceptions, and the strange cosmic joke is, in order to get more and achieve what you dream, you have to first feel as if it is possible and embody it, validate it.

We are love, already. It’s opening up to that, accepting it, and from that, we attract and build on what already exists. It is IN us. We cannot GET it from anyone else. That’s the key. So train hop to your future, and I’ll train hop to mine, but we will get there, the limits are only in our own brains.

It Takes A Village

A thought struck me while I was cooking breakfast this morning: I would never be where I am today without the things I’ve been through and done in the past. And where am I now? Stoked on life. Having so many amazing moments I didn’t think were possible.

What did it take to get me to lower my expenses, be honest about the fact that in order to pursue my art and be true to myself I couldn’t live the life I was living anymore? It took losing my health and my sanity and my marriage, that’s what. I had to be at a point where I had what seemed like absolutely nothing before I could take the reins of my own life and go after what I know I came here to do in a way I never have before: Music. Writing. Being Me.

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.

I used to be the world’s worst invalidator–of myself. And because I was constantly putting myself down I attracted people who criticized me in subtle ways that were corrosive and toxic. Then I internalized the beliefs of the people I’d surrounded myself by, as well as my own, that I couldn’t do what I wanted and survive.

It’s just so wack the way the universe works. I had to go through some terribly hard shit to get to the point where I realized life is short, I could die tomorrow and I will be bloody pissed if I didn’t do my damndest to own being the performer and musician and writer I’ve been working at being my entire life. It’s what I’m here to do.

I also used to be really good at playing the victim. I would blame circumstances or other people for my lot in life. It was the doctor’s fault for putting me on horrible back pain and anxiety medications that destroyed my health and nervous system and made me face the bowels of hell (it wasn’t. I sought him out, and I had a pre-existing addictive personality). It was my husband’s fault for wanting a more conventional life and not understanding that art is not and has never been a hobby for me (we were different. That’s all. Neither his way nor mine was “correct”). It was my full-time job’s fault for making me work so much (I chose to work 9 – 5 through my early twenties so I could go on more trips and buy more material things).

And I was real jealous. I had a hard time accepting other people’s successes because of my own lack of success at going after what I really desired. I also thought there wasn’t enough to go around. I held onto an American society competitive market attitude.

So what changed? I got off pills, first of all. Then, I acted as if I already was what I believed I was. I told people I was a musician instead of saying, “Er, sometimes I kind of play some songs and stuff.” I surrounded myself by people who would call me on my shit and demand I take action, instead of supporting me wallowing in reasons I couldn’t do what I believe in. I started taking control of my life instead of being a passenger in it drifting this way and that.

And I continue to do other things. Daily meditation. Journaling for hours a day to find out who the hell I am and what I really want. Making sure that if I’m not happy with my life I make tiny goals to move me towards my bigger goals. Giving myself credit every day and not looking for it in other people as much. Writing gratitude lists.

And eventually I ended up where I am now. Surrounded by people whose lives I respect and admire, people who are successfully doing what I want to do, therefore don’t naysay the possibility of doing so. If you talk to someone who hasn’t tried, they’re going to likely tell you you will fail. I intend to stick with those who have succeeded, and remain teachable. I have faith that if I was given  talents I will be able to use them in this life.

***

Last night, I got to jam out with some amazingly talented musicians doing krautrock style music (irony after all the krautrock stuff I posted a few days back, eh?). I lugged my keyboards and guitar out to my friend’s practice space; a musician girl friend down the street let me borrow her pimped out Fender Twin Reverb Amp. I got to sing, and play piano and guitar. We had an electric violinist and classical pianist who were trying out a jam, like me, alongside one of my oldest friends on drums, and a guitarist and bass player whose creds go back through a ton of amazing bands and decades in the music industry. They’re all paid, working, gigging musicians, amazingly talented, and people I want to be more like.

I came home and face planted on the bed, deliciously exhausted. Tomorrow, I have band practice for my own songs, we are working on seven of them right now. Friday, I’m going to go try out as singer for another band project, we are going to cover some PJ Harvey songs to warm up. This is how I am going to continue working my life. Music, music, music.

You know, mostly in my former life, I was afraid to be myself, and afraid to be happy. I thought I had to be negative and tough to protect myself. And I kept attracting people who reinforced this belief system. But I’ve learned in the past year, after leaving everything that was comfortable to me and starting all over again, that I don’t need to have people near me who make me feel small. I want to be around people who make me feel good and believe in me, so I started believing in myself. I deserve that.

I am grateful to be alive and doing what I love on a daily basis. I’m also grateful to all of the people who have helped me every step along the way. I read a quote the other day that said love is good when given, but better when shared, and I do believe it takes a village to raise an artist. We need each other. And I look around me and am so proud of my kick ass friends, writers, artists, musicians, who have walked with me through this past number of years. We are all doing amazing things with our lives. Success is how you define success. To me, success is managing to do so much of what I love, with or without validation from society. I told one of my friends last night that this has been an amazing year so far. “This will be a year to remember,” he said.

You never know what you can create if you believe in yourself.

In Love With Words

I fell in love with words at a young age, words that stretched my brain, made me think about something in a new way. I forget this sometimes. I’ve become inured to them in a sense after so many years of using them, harhar, but some words intrigue me. I want to write them out by hand, create songs using them. Anathema. Heathen. Decay. Beauty. Puissant. Ruse. Misguided. Orbital. Fractal. Shattered. Entropy. Dystopian. Cathartic. Transcendence. Translucent. Tumultuous. Turbulent. Trepidation. Isotopic. Isolation. Isotope. Sweetheart. Stilted. Lilted. Lover. Tumble.

When I was locked up in a foreign country boot camp type school as a teenager, we had six hours of self-guided class a day where we were to sit and do work while staff watched us to make sure we weren’t talking or misbehaving or non-verbally communicating or note passing.

Instead of the algrebra books and such, I pulled a dictionary from the shelf and hand wrote the definitions of words I found interesting, for hours. I wrote poems with those words. I sent the poems home to my parents.

Before the boot camp school I had a gutter punk boyfriend, my road dawg, who would get mad at me for using big words, as if it was a threat against his intelligence. “Stop trying to make me feel stupid,” he would say. Other kids used a lot of slang and dumbed down words. But I couldn’t stop using big words. I read a lot as a kid. They were stuck in me. To stop using them would be to stop being me.

“People always ask me if I’m English,” I said once to a friend. “Because you can actually articulate words?” he said. I’d never thought of it that way. I always thought big words made me exotic, using them in sentences made them interesting. There are so many words with so many different meanings. Some words I repeat over and over in my head. Some songs are titled by one word, one word which resonates through the body of the song, conveys a mood. Yet so many songs named by the same word are different.

But that’s the beauty of language. That all of us can write these songs based on one word, or encapsulated in one word. That words can mean so much, or so little. There was a guy once who told my friend, his girlfriend at the time, that he was ambivalent about their relationship. I thought that meant he didn’t care about her, so I freaked out. “Why would he say that to you,” I told her. “What a jerk!”

But then I looked up the word and found it meant conflicted. He’d been pursuing me while with her, and my own loyalties were ambivalent. I was young. But it made me more intrigued, that he could use that word to describe a relationship. And that the word applied to not one, but two situations in my current reality.

Words have strange power.

Touching

It’s been an interesting week. The last post was more of a rant than a pep talk, but kind of a tongue in cheek rant. Mostly I was speaking to our human need to make meaning out of seeming nonsense, how we need to believe that when we go through hard trial after hard trial, that it’s for a reason, that we can put it to good purpose.

I thought about it a few times this week, especially as I bumped into more than a few people who mentioned my blog or that they are reading this blog and I cringed inwardly at times thinking about what I shared. Do I really want everyone in all of these different social circles I’m a part of to know these things?

Yea, actually. I don’t really care. It’s what I write about. Write what you know, they say, and I know a lot about my own life and what I’ve learned from the experiences I’ve gone through. Isn’t that the point of existence? To learn?

It’s always awkward when you blog and write non-fiction about your life, because people get to know this word-based version of you without really spending time with you or actually knowing knowing you. They don’t call, they don’t write, they read.

I know this is a peril of the writing life, and have read up enough on how other personal non-fiction writers deal with it to have expected as much.

I also observed something like this when I dated my ex boyfriend. He was on a big record label, wrote beautiful music and attracted all these amazing fans due to his talent. Because of his success, people projected this personality onto him that kind of existed, but kind of didn’t. He was a person, with lots of real person issues.

***

I’ve wondered many times over the years what compels us to channel the muse. When I was younger, I was more mystical about it, thought my talents came straight from the gods (I think there’s a pantheon these days, like in old Greek days. Talk to me tomorrow and I might just call it “the universe” again). I thought musicians, writers and poets had a higher calling and thus were unique due to this special gift.

As I’ve grown up a bit, I’ve noticed a lot of our worship of icons in music, writing and art is based on this projected image of who we THINK the artist is, but in reality, artists are human beings and have just as many flaws as anyone else. And I’ve met all sorts of free souls in other lines of work who are contributing just as much, sometimes a lot more, than artists are to the world. Even Thoreau wasn’t really “roughing it,” if you look back at the facts. I recently read that his mom washed his laundry and brought him meals. Things get shined up and glamorized, we create gods out of men and pin all these attributes on them that don’t exist.

***

Now, in my case, I’m not being turned into a god, but people do get to see some sides of me I may not tell them in person, mostly stuff that’s pretty seemingly personal to them. This doesn’t mean I still don’t startle when someone I barely know asks me how that thing is going that they read about on my blog. I imagine we all deal with this due to Facebook to some extent, people reading about us but not commenting and then in person mentioning something they read about us.

***

It’s always interesting to learn that people are paying attention. I get a bit freaked out.

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***

Most of my life, I sought connection through art and music, and now that I am slowly finding it, I’m kind of blown away. It’s been a subtle, slow build, but I’ve learned that what I put my mind to and work hard for, truly believe in, tends to manifest in the universe’s own time, slowly or quickly, I never can tell. And most stuff that doesn’t manifest is usually because I’m not quite ready for it yet. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear–if you’re paying attention.

***

I had the honor of reading some of Lenore Kandel’s poetry at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco last night as part of the Litquake festival. She was a quite talented woman poet of the Beat era; she wrote a lot of poems that resonate with me. She was very zen, and also wrote provocative poems about love and sex and relationships and existence that got banned in the ’60s (they talk about fucking. A lot. And sex and love as a transcendent experience of worship).

It was a gift to see different and very talented people reading favorite poems of hers, a testament to how one poet’s work can speak to many people and affect them on a deep, deep level. It was also nice to not read my own poems or play my own music, but to support the ghost of a poet who obviously meant a lot to the people she touched, many of whom read last night.

This poetry, music, writing shit is amazing, folks. Never forget that. This is why we do it. One of the readers got up and talked about how Kandel was a poet who lived a very minimal life, never liked to play the game, but here her poetry was simply amazing. She was injured in a car accident at a relatively young age, seriously damaging her spine, lived in the same apartment in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, for forty years or so, with a little garden and a ton of book and tea.

There are a lot of talented amazing souls floating around in the world who will never rise above their base line income, but that’s not the point. The point is that Kandel lives on through her work and the memories of the people who knew her. The point is who we touch, and not the number of people we touch, necessarily, but the quality of the touching. And lest this devolve into some type of sex joke about touching, I’m going to leave off there.

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Patchwork Solutions

It’s hard for me to accept life just ain’t perfect. I want everything to be just so. I want the perfect space for me to recuperate from all of this madness to pop into my life, in the magical price range. I want another freelance gig that I can work around my existing library schedule to magically drop out of the air. I want to not have to ask people for help buying food or putting gas in my car.

We get through life on patchwork solutions. Nothing is perfect. Sure, you can clean the hell out of your house every week until it sparkle shines and call it perfect, but people are not, will never be, perfect. The perfect man does not exist. The perfect house doesn’t exist. The perfect life doesn’t exist. We cobble together gigs and places to live and friendships and people we date, marry or divorce throughout our lives.

Some people will say the things they cobbled together led them to the things they have now and for this they are grateful. I want to be one of those people, some day. I keep getting a lot of platitudes from people like, “Let go. Be Willing. It will all turn out better.” Blablablah.

What I really want to hear is, “I’m sorry this sucks. I went through it once. It was a roller coaster ride. I felt like a mess, like a crazy person. I got through on the scraps I was thrown and somehow I put together a life for myself that made sense but it took time.”

Wait, did I just say what I needed to hear to myself? Were the answers right here all along? I know what I need to do. I know what I need to hear.

Life is made up of patchwork solutions. We gotta use what we have, eat the scraps we’re thrown. I could learn to let go more…I have to. But…it’s hard to fall into something you don’t believe, when you think you don’t deserve better, when you feel you don’t deserve to be taken care of…or even deeper than that, that nobody can or will take care of you and you really need a full community of people giving you little things here and there to get through.

Life is hard. That’s all I know…

Still trying to find my artistic space where I can create and use those creations to process this unfortunate turn of events…to find out what I really think and feel. I’ve been given some stepping stones. For that, I’m grateful. I’m packing my stuff up this week, going to store it until I find a place I can afford that will not make me have to work more than I have to on things that aren’t leading me towards my goals. Life is short. Too short to put all my money into useless accoutrements.

It’s a fight, all of it is a fight. I looked at a room in my price range the other day in West Oakland and at least a dozen people were competing for it. By the time I arrived, about 5 people had already been interviewed for the tiny room…it was a small room. But I would take it.

I’m letting go of the outcome. I can only do what I can do. People around me don’t have much, they give what they can. I don’t have much, I do what I can. I’m picking up extra hours here and there at the library, trying to get through it without worrying about losing my soul.

I keep checking my email and my phone every five minutes. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. What am I looking for? A magical answer to all of my problems. Someone to figure it all out for me. A sign from above. The signs and answers are within this ransacked house of my soul.

Sometimes, things are just very, very hard. Hard not to look back and think man, I did have it pretty good, even in this suburban motel-looking, tiny-spider-infested apartment by the BART in the middle of a suburb with wackadoodle neighbors. I had space…I could afford food, mostly. I could focus on my art and my gigs. Someone had my back. I had my special someone. It was two against the world. Now that someone doesn’t, or can’t have my back. I have to cover my own back. I’m not used to it…not in a way that isn’t messy and grungy and not normal. But here I go…back down that road. I’m exhausted, and I’ve not even begun the journey yet. All I know is some damn good songs come from heartbreak…once you have a place to create them.

****

I know you really love me
but you see my hands are tied
I know it must have hurt you
it must have hurt your pride
to have to stand beneath my window
with your bugle and your drum
and me, I’m up there waiting
for the miracle
for the miracle to come… 

No I don’t believe you’d like it
you wouldn’t like it here
there ain’t no entertainment
and the judgements are severe
the maestro says it’s mozart
but it sounds like bubble gum
when you’re waiting
for the miracle
for the miracle to come…

Nothing left to do 
when you know that you’ve been taken. 
Nothing left to do 
when you’re begging for a crumb 
Nothing left to do 
when you’ve got to go on waiting 
waiting for the miracle to come. 

Ah baby, let’s get married, 
we’ve been alone too long. 
Let’s be alone together. 
Let’s see if we’re that strong. 
Yeah let’s do something crazy, 
something absolutely wrong 
while we’re waiting 
for the miracle, for the miracle to come. 

Nothing left to do … 

-L. Cohen 

Why I Love Music

When I was a kid, my dad, a concert pianist, spent hours every day practicing the piano. While he practiced late at night I played with my stuffed ponies in bed, making them ride across the blankets in step to his sonatas. My parents owned a piano business and sold Kurzweil keyboards when they were gaining popularity in the 80′s, so I had unlimited access to these instrument in particular, along with plenty of space to explore the notes on the scale and different instrumental sounds on the keyboard.

When I was two, my mother remembers turning the stereo off while some people were gathered for dinner. I went over to the stereo and started hitting the speaker and wailing. She turned it back on and I was quiet and content again.

As I grew, I unconsciously decided that I wanted to broaden my horizons. I liked classical music, sometimes, but it seemed like there might be something with a heavier motif.

When I was 8 or 9, I snuck into my mom’s office to see what she had. She kept “bad” records (according to my dad), like Michael Jackson, records the church my parents grew up in judged. At my friend’s houses I discovered Madonna. My friend and I would hide in the closet and listen to Madonna’s greatest hits on a white tape using a tiny personal tape recorder.

Going into the record store was like entering some strange futuristic world full of beeping tags and shrink wrapped tomes to the gods of music. Access was granted through the exchange of green pieces of paper my mom kept in her wallet, paper she sometimes would use to buy me one thing I wanted.

Most of the time, I borrowed music from neighbors, boys who had access to things like White Lion or Oingo Boingo. Secret stashes of music my parents would never approve of. It was thrilling to seek these out.

When I was in fourth grade, I played the Back to the Future soundtrack over and over on my beat up walkman. I played it when I was drawing on the white board in my room. I played it when I was roaming the creeks looking for things to collect, while I walked down the street or while I rode my bike. I listened to it so much my mom took it away from me and hid it. I later found it in her underwear drawer. I was addicted to the Huey Lewis song, “The Power of Love.” I wanted to live in a world where every action I took was important, could change the past, present and future all at once. The soundtrack made me feel this. And adults had the power to take it away, just by deciding to.

Once, when I spent the night at my grandma’s house, my aunts tucked a couple of tapes into my sleeping bag with me. Kate Bush’s The Whole Story and Peter Gabriel’s So. I was pulled into a dark, beautiful, creepy world I never wanted to leave. The combination of instruments and vocals moved me in a way I couldn’t explain. These secret tapes were the answer to everything.

Once in a while I would hear a song I really loved on the radio, and I couldn’t press the red record button fast enough. I cobbled together mix tapes consisting of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” Erasure’s “A Little Respect,” Roxanne’s “It Must Have Been Love.” Music played out loud on the school bus gave me access to the boys I liked, to the secret world of the cool kids who sat in the back of the bus. Music was a secret language with many tongues; once you found the right tongue you could speak to people like yourself for the first time.

I stole a single cassette tape once, from Tower Records when I was around 10 years old. I felt so guilty I couldn’t sleep that night. It was from the movie Mermaids, a movie I’d had to watch at my friends house because my parents forbade it. Guiltily I confessed to my mom while she was trying to go to sleep. She helped me take the tape back to the record store with a handwritten note saying, “I’m sorry.” I left it on the counter when no one was looking and ran out the door.

In my teens, a guy friend turned me on to Nirvana. Another guy said Nirvana was lame, that I should listen to Metallica. I listened to both. I spent hours reading the liner notes to every Guns N’ Roses album, had a huge crush on Axl Rose. I spent hours learning the songs from Use Your Illusion I and II on the piano.

No one was going to take away my music. If they did, they would succeed in brainwashing me. When I got sent away to our church’s girls camp in the summers, I snuck my walkman into my suitcase. At night, I fell asleep under the stars listening to Nirvana’s Incesticide or Guns N’ Roses Lies. I felt safe with my headphones on to keep the crazies away.

I found all the back archives of Depeche Mode, The Cure, and others. I inhaled Nine Inch Nails. During a phase during my freshman year hippy friends introduced me to Grateful Dead bootlegs, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Duran Duran. I searched dusty record stores for The Magical Mystery Tour, Houses of the Holy and Rio. Inside these records was the key to a magical world from the past filled with mysterious teenagers who could give me the answers to the universe. I devoured a whole genre from Hendrix to Joplin in one year of high school when I was supposed to be studying.

I often tried to go to shows, but I lived so far out in the sticks, without a car, that it was virtually impossible until I was near 15. The radio was playing U2, Portishead, The Flaming Lips. I culled the BMG music catalog for albums, ordering the requisite 12 cds and never paying for them, multiple times over a few year period.

I had a very brief period in which I tried to curb my music addiction (after spending time in a strict school in another country where music wasn’t allowed much) listening only to The Carpenters and Enya to purify myself of the sin that was rock music. That didn’t last long at all. Darker albums called to me and I acquiesced, home at last.

And then, in the 2000′s, while searching for a cheap show to go to for one of my music classes, I discovered some indie bands through a guy at Hot Topic. Vast. Unified Theory. That led me down a rabbit hole. Suffice it to say I learned more about the music industry than I ever wanted to know. I took classes. Moved to LA. Kept practicing the music I’d been working on since I was 13.

The next few years, as I got access to unlimited internet connection, I discovered even more music. An ex’s girlfriend opened up her CD case and showed me all the bands she dug: dark industrial music. My boyfriend, now my husband, shared a whole CD case full of music I’d missed out on in my teens. Thrill Kill Kult, Ministry, Switchblade Symphony, God’s Kitchen, Slayer. Industrial, Indie, House, Psychedelic Trance, Heavier Metal. In turn, he discovered my more mainstream albums, the whole discography of The Cure, Tori Amos, Nine Inch Nails. Music was life blood to both of us and it’s kept us in love with talking to each other for over eight years.

Not much has changed. I still write late into the night with my favorite songs playing in the background. Music can take me out of myself, can make me feel whole, can help me through any emotion. Music connects me with others, feeds my creativity, gives me reasons to continue trudging along.

These days, I write fun music reviews for an Indie music site, troll blip.fm for tunes and talk music perfundities with my friends during my free time. I love music. I love finding new music. I love playing it, working on it, singing it, listening to it, harmonizing with it, analyzing it, tearing it apart. I spend time critiquing it, creating it, writing about it and finding it. I recommend stuff to friends, they recommend stuff to me. I’ve been known to dissect songs for hours in the car on road trips, much to the chagrin of anyone who isn’t as obsessed with it as I am. I’m a huge music nerd. And without it, the world becomes a sterile cold place. From Beethoven to West African guitar to Combichrist, I listen to it all.

I used to spend hours making elaborate mix tapes. Now my itunes library is so full I have to do mass prunings. The access to music in this day and age is UNBELIEVABLE. What was your path to music? Were there certain bands that your parents thought were taboo? How do you feel about it? What would you do without it?

What You Love Is Really Important

“What you love, what you long to do, is really, really important. When you live in alignment with those things, life becomes joyful, alive, full color, move-you-to-tears gorgeous. But most of us get lost from our true loves along the way in life. There is a way to get back on track.“

From Wise Living.

Life is short. How many shoulds are we under the spell of? I was reading this guest post on Goodlife Zen and it spoke to me. Reassess your life and find out what things you are doing because you think you should, what things you do because you think you have to, and brainstorm your way out of them.

In my opinion, we get lost down divergent roads when we’re not following our piper’s song.

The cost.

just breathe.

This is life, these moments. The hand of my husband, soft and warm, in mine. The dusty bedroom full of clothes and strong-willed cats. Boxing up the possessions that weigh us down. Signing 80 hours of my next however many months away to work on my grandpa’s house in exchange for rent while we hunker down, safe in the hills with the eucalyptus and redwood trees shielding us against the view of the city and it’s economic storm clouds down below.

This is my life, rusty as my breath tastes coming fast as my heart pounds through it’s thick walls of sinew and flesh and blood. As I drop the person I care about most in the world off at the airport for a business trip. As I drive away, after lingering in the park zone as long as I can, watching him go.

This is the cost. Everything I believe in, everything I am, wrapped up in his arms before he kisses me goodbye.

We’ve lost so much these last months. Job, apartment, money, health, our dog’s leg to the trust and faith of surgery.

What we’ve gained, as the world has constricted around us like the throat of a viper on two tiny mice, is the only thing we really had all along. Each other. Trust. Patience. Love.

And in moments like these, my heart skips a beat as I realize just how much more I have to lose.